I love finding a paper published years ago (5, 10, 15, 20) that isn't famous or field changing or has a ton of citations but when you read it is just awesome. Like, beautifully designed & executed & written. Best part is that there are so many papers like that lurking in the literature.

This is your regular reminder to always always put scale bars on your figures & always always make sure you use properly scaled axis on your graphs

Venkatesh B, et al. (@tanentzapflab.bsky.social lab) Inside-out integrin activation is essential for early mammalian development. Mol Biol Cell. 2025 Sep 3;:mbcE25030106. [Epub ahead of print]. PMID: 40901728

The goal of a PhD is not to learn some facts or read a few papers or learn a bunch of techniques. The goal of a PhD is to learn independence, problem solving, how to finish things you start, resilience, & gain the ability to adapt & think creatively. Learning these things is hard.

The basic problem in science funding in most countries is that the government decides how many scientists to support but universities/institutes decide how many scientists to hire & those #'s are incongruous. I'll never understand why they don't just talk to each other & coordinate.

I think a good rule of thumb is to spend at least as much time thinking about your data as you did obtaining it. It's common for people to spend a lot less time thinking than doing which gives rise to all kinds of problems.

It's Friday it's summer, let's have some fun. Drop in the comments the meanest things a reviewer has ever said to you (bonus if it's on a manuscript you think is good & that you ended up publishing in a different journal). I'll start with the masterpiece below.

Idea of the day: For every publication the first author prepares & records a 10-20 minute seminar talk about the work that gets posted on the journal website along with the manuscript.

Friends in Los Angels. I am giving a seminar in UCLA tomorrow (Friday May 30th) at 3:30 at Boyer 159. I will be speaking about how stem cells make good decisions when seemingly every signaling pathway in the world is present in their environment telling them to do something totally different.

The turmoil impacting NIH funding is a reminder how important it is that ALL countries have robust & well resourced research funding bodies to support science. The world of science can't rely on the US & the NIH to continue playing such a major role in funding key scientific work

I've been doing this for 30 years & I still can't believe that when people ask me what I do for a living I get to tell them "I'm a scientist". It feels like a kid's fantasy career that they dress up as for Halloween, like "astronaut" or "pirate". I feel very lucky I get to do this day in & day out.

1. I think a common misconception in science policy is that we need to convince regular tax payers that science is worth funding. But I think the data shows this has little effect on science funding.

Over my career I learned that whenever there was a paper, or a technique, or a finding that I thought was totally wrong all I had to do was wait & it would go away. Alternatively, I found out that actually I was the one with the wrong opinion. Whatever the case, I learned that time is my friend.

Registration is still open to this exciting meeting! Besides cutting edge science and nice people, it’s also a fantastic location to take a bit of a break from it all!

This week has been comically busy, I’ve been so under the cosh that I spent 10 minutes yesterday frantically searching the kitchen for the grater & turns out I randomly put it in the fridge in my absent mindedness. Please share your best "absent minded scientist" story in the comments below.

Reading a nice polished CV is useful & everything but the most important part of my scientific training, the 18 months I spent on a project that failed, which taught me resilience, problem solving, humility, & other such wisdom, is nowhere to be found on my CV. So CVs have their limits.

Another reminder. Deadline is approaching, this meeting is going to be awesome. Please join us!

1. There is increasingly a trend to tell politicians & the public that there are magic solutions to make science be quick & efficient ("moon shots", "AI", whatever is the got rend of the day). That if we only found some technique or the right funding mechanism it will speed up & be efficient

Top 10 ways American Science can survive the 15% indirect cap: 1. Breed special transgenic mice that can run for days in tiny hamster wheel turbines to keep lights on. 2. Get athletic program staff to donate 1% of their salaries to the research thus raising 100 billion dollars a year.

You can be a PI, you can be on the job for many decades, you can think deeply & thoroughly about how you do things, you can have much wisdom & experience. You can be all of that & still make big dumb painful errors. And as painful as these errors are you pick yourself up, fix things, & go on.

Look I'm no expert on the intricacies of the US or any other research ecosystem but my basic philosophy is that any funding structure that encourages & incentivises institutions to hire the people who get the most grant funding rather than those who do the best research is inherently bad for science

The email inequality principle states that you expect people to reply to your messages immediately but you will not reply to a simple message in your inbox that you just totally know someone is waiting for impatiently.

I love that when RNA splicing was discovered the title of the paper was "An amazing sequence arrangement at the 5′ ends of adenovirus 2 messenger RNA". I think every scientist should get one paper in their career where they get to call their discovery something like "amazing" in the title.

1. A thread about the value of doing "slow science": When I was in grad school I heard this (likely apocryphal) story about one of my favourite scientists: Barbara McClintock.

1. A viable scientific ecosystem provides a great variety of environments for scientists to thrive. Some need to be left alone & work best in a small group, some like large multidisciplinary consortia, some build a body of work slowly & incrementally over many years, others seek a few big findings

1. On this #HolocaustMemorialDay I remember my great grandfather Jacob Klein (here in his Austro-Hungarian army veterinarian uniform in 1914). He, my great grandmother & 6 of their 8 children perished in the death camps, his daughter, my great aunt Aranka Klein, survived Auschwitz.

It's depressing to me that once upon a time a couple of people misused or stole a couple of million dollars of grant money & now universities & research institutes & grant agencies spend many billions a year & countless person hours making sure no one misuses or steals any grant money.

For early career researchers interested in the Fibronectin, Integrins and Related Molecules GRS/GRC this May, don’t forget to sign up! The deadline for submitting an abstract to be considered for an oral presentation for the GRS is less than a week away! Register here: www.grc.org/fibronectin-...

A reminder to colleagues interested in Cell-Matrix adhesion & anything ECM related that registration is now open for the Fibronectin, Integrins & related molecules Gordon Research Conference. Incredible list speakers! incredible location! it will 🔥 🔥 🔥 Please join us! www.grc.org/fibronectin-...

bsky I need advice. We made an antibody & published it. It turned out to be SO useful & dozens of labs requested it, which made me so happy! BUT now we've run out. People keep asking for it & I hate telling them we're out. I want to make more but we don't have the funds right now. what would you do?

Dear fellow scientists: Have you used generative AI such as chatGPT to help writing papers, particularly introductions? If so what are the ethical considerations around that? Should this help be acknowledged? I feel like this will become increasingly prevalent & we need clearly defined rules/norms.

1. I feel like this is such obvious advice that it gets taken for granted & consequently no one says this to young scientists but READ PAPERS, read all the papers. As you move up in your career you will have less & less time to do this. Read everything that appeals to you not just in your field

One of the most surprising lessons for me during my 30 years of doing science is how it's essentially impossible predict what major scientific breakthroughs will emerge or where they will emerge from. But the way we fund science is mostly based on the assumption that we can make such predictions.

It's always a thrill to get an email from one of your all time science heroes.

My 3 favourite things about being a scientist: my full time job is to solve mysteries (how cool is that!), constantly being amazed by how beautiful & surprising the natural world is, getting to work w/ people who are smarter than me & have skills I can only dream of having on problems I care about.

I really like papers that try to "solve" problems or explain how things work but I also really really like papers that show that a problem is much more complicated or that Nature is messy. I think those papers are very underrated & that their contribution to science is often super important.

The most cliched writing advice is also the best. The enemy of the writer is the blank page. Start writing, put something down, it doesn't have to be good or make sense or be cohesive or even be logical. But don't worry about all that, just start. Once you get going you can edit & fix. Just start.

One of the best parts of being a scientist is that you get experience the feeling of mastery. That incredibly satisfying feeling of being very good at a skill or a task that's hard & that most people can't do well (mostly because they haven't chosen to put the time into it like you did).

We don't talk nearly enough about fun in science. "Fun" doesn't get your grants funded or your paper published (& aren't we will serious scientists). But for me anyways I'm about 1000X more likely to start a project if it sounds like it will be buckets of fun to do.

My favourite papers are the ones I read them & say "wait, this is such a simple & obvious & elegant thing to do! And they learned so much by doing it! I can't believe no one had done it before!"

A fundamental law of science is that the last 5% of the paper take 80% of the effort.

1. On this #HolocaustMemorialDay I remember my great grandfather Jacob Klein (here in his Austro-Hungarian army veterinarian uniform in 1914). He, my great grandmother & 6 of their 8 children perished in the death camps, his daughter, my great aunt Aranka Klein, survived Auschwitz.

Spectacular sunset in Vancouver last night as seen from the campus of the University of British Columbia

Stunning day in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a great place to study and work!

Happy, peaceful, & safe Hanukkah from all of us

Looking forward to travelling to Boston to attend the cellbio2023 meeting. If you are going see you there!

Hello bluesky